Connor crouched beside the gates of the cemetery, his form broken up by a thick trench coat hanging loosely over a dark hoodie and jeans. Dirt clung to the course treads his steel-toed boots, serving as a reminder of every night he had made the hidden trek to the home of his only true friends.

The guard patrolling the grounds passed absently by him as he always did, holding the shifting tub of lard that was his gut with the hand not grasping a rusted flashlight. Connor had promised himself once that if the fat toad ever actually saw him that he would take that light from him and send him to join the rest of his friends. He may even be nice enough to keep him warm a night or two, once the beatles had a go at him of course.

His sister had been the first he had shared a night with, the first person the beatles and the worms and the dirt had made pretty, even prettier than she was alive even. His parents had made them share the same dirty cot when they were alive, it had seemed only natural that they spent one more night in the same bed after she had gone away.

But as the nights went by Sister had gotten thinner and thinner, her bones weaker and weaker. Connor didn’t want to leave her there in the dark dirt, but if he didn’t he knew one day he would wake up having squashed what was left of her. He had found another like his sister, fresher, barely touched by the beatles and the worms, and she had become his sister for a little while. More came after that and then more. Connor had lost track of how long he had been coming to the cemetery, and he had lost track of how many corpses he had called his sister for a night or three. Had it been years he had been coming to visit his friends? He remembered how the winter had hardened the ground and then melted to make it soft again, he thought that must have meant it had been at least one year. He didn’t think it mattered, but still, he wondered.

The guard waddled further down the trail and Connor sprung from his hiding place and dove and snaked his way expertly between the gravestones, barely making a sound aside from the occasional gasp of breath. Each bound took him further from the light of the guard’s light and plunged him deeper into the darkness that he called his home.

Darkness could hide him well enough, it was true, but it could never hide his friend’s resting places from him. Dark earth, still moist and turned, drew his eye as he skulked between the graves. If Connor had to guess, it was some old bag of brittle bones that just hadn’t woken up one day. The beatles would make her pretty again, he thought, they always did.

Keeping low, Connor crossed the distance to the fresh grave, drawing his shovel out from his coat. The same shovel he had used to make his mother and father go away like they made Sister do. The same shovel he had used to bury them under the house. He hugged the rusted red spade to his chest as he vaulted down to meet his new friend. The gravedigger, or whatever people called them, looked like he had left the task of filling in the grave until the morning. Good, Connor thought.

He landed with a muted thud on the lid of the coffin in a flutter of his coat, throwing aside his shovel just as quickly. The thick smell of fresh black earth filled his nostrils, causing his pale flesh to prickle and tingle in a way his mother had told him was a sin. He squatted over the coffin and grinned, running a hand across the smooth wood.

Suddenly a dry hiss vibrated out through the wooden shell between him and the night’s corpse lover, accompanied by an onslaught of furious scratches against the inside of the lid.

Connor grinned, he had always wondered if someday this would happen. So many nights the bodies that were to be his sister, his lover, had laid still beside him. But not this one! Oh no, Connor thought as he began to laugh, not tonight!